I think the intent is to demonstrate that the user owns a legal copy - and that intent is to clear their obligations - not the legal obligations of someone seeking to get around that. Of course it can be circumvented. So, technically - that's correct - it doesn't make YOU legally compliant, but it unbinds FAF from you in the legal sense by discharging their responsibility.

Rather than blaming the factory for the issue - you might wish to simply consider the scaling of naval units. There is a LOT of room to decrease the size, especially of the largest units - and I can say, having done this years ago in LOUD, ships rarely have issues leaving the yard now.

There are several moving parts at work here.

First off, the GC is not on the Land layer, it's still technically on the seabed - and you don't have Water Vision, so to you, it's not visible. If you had WaterVision, in your blueprint, you'd be able to see him. Even though the GC is underwater, it still has normal Vision, so it can see you.

Second, your weapons are not likely allowed to hit units that are on the seabed AND below water. Whereas the GC's Eye beam weapon is allowed to fire when it's above the water level at targets that are above the water. This particular situation, might be improved by insuring that the bone, on the GC, that is above the water, is listed as one of it's 'Target Bones', as found in it's blueprint. In this way, your weapons would have a bone, that they can target, when it gets above the waves.

@Deribus Not sure - we've had the d3d_windowscursor command in-line at LOUD for more than a week now, but a couple of days ago, we had some new users showing up that continued to have the problem - using the absolutely latest drivers. The task manager services did the trick, which was good for the users - but the services restart themselves, and not too many users are comfortable with altering core services.

I sincerely hope that this problem gets a proper NVidia resolution, sooner than later, as it's driving people off of FA entirely, especially new users that already have to deal with surround sound issues.

We addressed this issue several years ago in LOUD - it was a rather simple fix - and it hasn't made the HARMS, or other T3 torpedo defense units, awesome or unkillable. What it has done is properly framed the submarine, torpedo and anti-torpedo units in a way that makes them viable, and a meaningful portion of the naval game. If you don't properly compose your fleets with the appropriate units, you should expect to be defeated.

It's an unintended side-effect of AOE which can easily be addressed either by altering the elevation value of the subs (which won't work on maps that have ultra-shallow water) or by having AOE range reduced whenever such projectiles impact water (which is a natural behavior).

@vanifica said in Questions about performance:

I would be totally into this. I guess I assumed LOUD worked by graphical changes, but I never tested it extensively since it didn't have an online client as far as I could tell.

They claim 5000 units without any simspeed issues IIRC. That does imply there's some "magic bullet" somewhere in the code they figured out?

This has long been a myth - LOUD never gained any real performance boost from suppression of graphics. We did toy with this several years ago, and it stuck for some reason. There are certainly some graphical things we simplified or tied to the SIM speed, but over time, most of the pretty was returned to normal.

As Jip rightly points out - there was never a 'magic bullet' - just a lot of patient work going thru almost the entire code base, implementing the techniques that Jip is encouraging FAF to adopt now. The gains are real, but the work is extensive, but not difficult.

@deribus said in Stronger ASF:

This is the approach LOUD takes.

That's not true - ASF stats are essentially identical except in their relative cost/firepower relationship to other units.

Map size has little to do with it - the real issue draws in two aspects - unit count (which is directly responsible for the SIM slowing down) and traffic issues (unit collisions).

While a smaller map does reduce the memory requirement a bit, it has no impact beyond that. Unit count (and the complexity of those units) has long been recognized as the largest influence on performance, and memory consumption - and this 'unresponsiveness' that you're seeing is related to that.

It can impact players at different times, as it's really a measure of CPU 'saturation' - and if the problem is severe enough, it can impact multiplayer games for all players.

Unit collisions play a very big role in this - so anytime you have a situation with a large number of those (like clumps of engineers all crowding around a factory), or traffic jams caused by really tight and complex terrain, you're going to see a very big upswing in CPU activity - which manifests as 'unresponsiveness'.

Currently 62.

The use of mass, for veteran levels, is purely a FAF based change. It supplants the original kill based mechanic. The healing mult is likewise, a FAF-only change. In the original game, when a unit made a vet level, it would have it's HP set to a % of it's new HP max, based upon how damaged it was. In FAF, this gets replaced with a fixed % of healing, based upon the HP of the unit at the time it makes the level.

There was a mod, many years back, called Total Veterancy - that extended the concept pretty much along the lines described above. It was quite popular, balance issues aside.

The primary drawback of this method is performance. Unit buffs are very memory intensive - especially when considering stacking multiple unique buffs, and even moreso when you consider that buffs are stored per unit - this adds up VERY quickly, not just for adding and removing the buffs, but the amount of memory consumed by each buff, for each unit, grows very quickly and will grow to a point where it will lead to memory cap crashes.

The mechanics for doing this work are pretty sound, but fairly code heavy.

BrewLAN

Splitting a single projectile - into multiple 'child' projectiles, is currently done in a couple of already existing weapons. The Cybran T2 Mobile Tactical Missile launcher unit, and the AEON T3/T4 Artillery Experimental.

You should look at how those scripts deal with creating new projectiles, based on the trajectory of the old one - while in flight.

There are several moving parts at work here.

First off, the GC is not on the Land layer, it's still technically on the seabed - and you don't have Water Vision, so to you, it's not visible. If you had WaterVision, in your blueprint, you'd be able to see him. Even though the GC is underwater, it still has normal Vision, so it can see you.

Second, your weapons are not likely allowed to hit units that are on the seabed AND below water. Whereas the GC's Eye beam weapon is allowed to fire when it's above the water level at targets that are above the water. This particular situation, might be improved by insuring that the bone, on the GC, that is above the water, is listed as one of it's 'Target Bones', as found in it's blueprint. In this way, your weapons would have a bone, that they can target, when it gets above the waves.

@destroier6 It's not a bug - and it's not the AIx Omni setting.

The stock campaign AI is almost entirely 'scripted' and isn't really doing anything but following the plan written for it.

There is a flaw in the targeting process, where an empty launcher will remain 'locked' on the target - which prevents other launchers, which are loaded, from firing at that missile - it's called the 'shooter cap'.

What needs to happen, is that shortly after firing (even when there are additional rounds in the launcher), the launcher needs to go 'offline', and drop it's target - which will allow other launchers to engage the missile. Now, this is how the launchers are meant to work, and most of the time they do this, but - if there are a lot of launchers involved, and the primary happens to go empty - there's little to no chance that the target will drop, in time, for another launcher to perform an intercept.

This is the same mechanic that keeps all your SMD's from firing at the same inbound missile - so it's not something to be disabled.

@Laso That's essentially how M28 (and many previous AI as well) performs. It has information it shouldn't, and does things with units that you would find it either impossible or incredibly difficult to do. It's not, and doesn't claim to be, a level playing field.

There have been several attempts over the last decade+, to loosen the source code from it's rights holder. All have been denied or rebuffed, even with significant monetary offers. The game still provides a small, but steady, revenue stream, so it's still viewed as a productive asset. While that situation is most certainly declining, year over year, I don't imagine that any offer south of $100k is going to get a whole lot of notice.

I'd like to hope that I'm wrong, and sometime soon - but that's how it stands.